Metaphoric Matrix: Magnetism in Frankenstein

David Ketterer

{55} In the interests of economy and dramatic directness, the
encompassing story of Walton's polar exploration is usually
omitted in the Frankenstein films. The famous Boris Karloff version opens with
Frankenstein collecting his grisly anatomical bits and pieces.
If the basic story can be related without the Walton subplot, it
is not unreasonable to wonder about the aesthetic relevance of
that aspect of Mary's book. Indeed, that most sensitive and
exhaustive of Mary Shelley's critics, Jean de Palacio, cites
with approval the view that Walton's letters are extraneous to
Frankenstein's narrative.1 I believe that Palacio is wrong:
the Walton envelope is essential to the book's overall unity and
design.

It has often been observed that to a degree Walton is a double
or reflection of Frankenstein. Like Frankenstein, he is in the
grip of a scientific ambition which competes with the enjoyment
of human relationships. Confronted with the consequences of
Frankenstein's ambition, Walton is apparently persuaded to
reverse his priorities. Walton is, then, very much not
extraneous to Mary Shelley's moral argument. Furthermore, it
might be argued that as the person for whom Frankenstein's
career provides an object lesson, Walton is a stand-in for the
reader, a connecting link whereby the real world might appear to
complete the series of concentric circles formed by the literary
world of the text.

But more to the point is the fact that Walton's specific goal
allows Mary Shelley to expand metaphorically on the import of
Frankenstein's creation. Walton's quest for the North Pole and
Frankenstein's interest in animating dead flesh are symbolically
equivalent. The connecting link here is electromagnetism. When
Mary wrote Frankenstein the relationship between magnetism and electricity was appreciated
but imperfectly understood. For example, mesmerism was called
animal magnetism because it was thought to depend on universal
fields of influence, electrical fluids of a vaguely biochemical
nature. However, from the point of view of electro-magnetic
theory, the essential point is that Walton hopes to "discover
the wondrous power which attracts the needle," to ascertain "the
secret of the magnet" (p.
16),2
while Frankenstein relies on electricity to jolt his creation
into life. The {56} "secret of the magnet" is the secret of life
itself. Any phallic connotations in Walton's phrase, "the
wondrous power which attracts the needle," are entirely
appropriate. The secret of life is also the secret of reality.
Thus when Frankenstein reveals that "The world was to me a
secret which I desired to divine" (p. 36), he is speaking about the
same secret. And given the galvanizing role of "animal
magnetism" in this story about a man who discovers the secret of
life, the polar destination is inevitable.

Now is the time to emphasize what is perhaps the most potent
aspect of the analogy I am pursuing between the creation of the
book and the creation of the monster. If electricity animates
the monster, it was talk of electricity that sparked Mary's
creation. In her Introduction, she recalls listening to Byron
and Shelley discuss "the principle of life" and "the experiments
of Dr. Erasmus Darwin" (p.
8). Reportedly, Darwin
"preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some
extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion." The
pasta, of course, did not come to life, but Mary goes on to
speculate that "Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism
had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a
creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued
with vital warmth" (p. 9).
In experimenting with the effects of electricity on the nervous
systems of animals and human beings, Darwin was specifically
indebted to Luigi Galvani
(1737-1798) who gave his name
to the galvanic electricity of which Mary speaks. It was
Galvani's wife who, in 1786, drew his
attention to the convulsive movements of a dead skinned frog.
Accidentally, the exposed nerves in one of the frog's legs
touched a scalpel which had in turn become charged by contact
with an electrical apparatus.

Shelley, of course, was
fascinated by the subject of electricity since his time at Eton
when he became interested in the galvanic battery, and no doubt
Mary would have acquired a certain amount of knowledge from him.
When, in 1810, Jefferson Hogg stumbled into
Shelley's rooms in University
College, he found a scene remarkably suggestive of
Frankenstein's laboratory as cinematically imagined, even
allowing for some exaggeration in his eventual description. From
the confusion of books and instruments it appears

as if the young chemist, in order to analyse the mystery of
creation had endeavoured first to re-construct the primeval
chaos. The tables and especially the carpet, were already
stained with large spots of various hues, which frequently
proclaimed the agency of {57} fire. An electrical machine, an
air pump, the galvanic trough, a solar microscope, and large
glass jars and receivers were conspicuous amidst the mass of
matter.

After a while liquid being treated in a retort "boiled over,
adding fresh stains to the table, and rising in fumes with a
most disagreeable odour."4 On another occasion, according to
Hogg's recollection of their conversation, Shelley exclaimed:
"What a mighty instrument would electricity be in the hands of
him who knows how to wield it, in what manner to direct its
omnipotent energies; . . . how many of the secrets of
nature would such a stupendous force unlock."5 There can be
no question that Shelley would have had much to contribute to
the philosophical conversation that Mary recalls in her
Introduction.

But was Shelley in conversation with Byron as Mary claims? James
Rieger believes not. He follows the tentative suggestion of W.
M. Rossetti in arguing that it was Polidori and not Byron who
discussed "the principle of life" (p. 8) with Shelley.6 Since Mary's
Journal is blank for the period from May 14, 1815, to
July 20, 1816, Polidori's
diary provides the best documentary record of the time when
Frankenstein was conceived and his entry for June 15,
1816, notes that in the evening "Shelley and I had a
conversation about principles, -- whether man was to be thought
merely an instrument."7 I see no reason to conclude as
Rieger does that "this is almost certainly the conversation
alluded to by Mary Shelley" in her Introduction.8 That she
refers to "the principle of life" as the subject of the
conversation and that he speaks of "principles" counts for very
little. The conversation that Polidori records involving the
possibility that man is an instrument might well have been about
fate and free will rather than the principles of galvanic
electricity. Rieger wishes to suggest that the inspirational
dream followed the discussion on the 15th of June and thus
predated Byron's proposal of a ghost-story competition which
Rieger believes occurred the following day. To make this case
Rieger uses the dubious strategy of moving from provable
inaccuracies in the Introduction -- Mary's summary of a story
from Jean Baptiste Benoit Eyries' Fantasmagoriana (1812) -- to assumed
ones.

There is no overpowering reason to doubt that the conversation
Mary recalls took place between Shelley and Byron and that it
transpired after the ghost-story competition was proposed. At
the same time, even if Polidori was not present at that
particular conversation, it is surely possible that he had at
some point given either Byron or Shelley or both the benefit of
his specialized knowledge on the subject of electricity. Not
only was Polidori a first-rate, newly-qualified physician, but
he had, in 1815,
published a treatise on sleep-walking, a trance-like state which
he and others attributed to the hypnotic effects of "animal
magnetism." And during the last week of June, 1816, when Mary
and Polidori (nursing a sprained ankle) were thrown into each
other's company while Byron and Shelley toured Lac Leman, whether or not any
indiscretions took place,9 it is surely possible that the
topic of electrical influences might have arisen again. It seems
likely, then, that Mary acquired at least a rudimentary
scientific knowledge from both Shelley and Polidori as well as
from her reading of Davy.

The matter is important because at issue is the degree to which
Frankenstein transformed the nature of the gothic
romance. To what extent might it be described retrospectively
as science fiction? Is it, as R. Glynn Grylls claims, {58} "the
first of the Scientific Romances"?10 Presumably the assumption is that
had Frankenstein retained his early enthusiasm for Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus, and animated his
creation by alchemical or
supernatural means, the book would belong within traditional
gothic confines. It is the assumption that Frankenstein employs
contemporary science that invites the sense of a generic
transfer into the realm of science fiction.

The Preface which Shelley wrote as the putative author of the
original edition of Frankenstein opens with reference to
this transfer:

The event on which this fiction is founded, has been supposed by
Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany,
as not of impossible occurrence. I shall not be supposed as
according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an
imagination; yet, in assuming it as the basis of a work of
fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series
of supernatural terrors. The event on which the interest of the
story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of
spectres or enchantment. [Preface 1]11

Possibly influenced by this Preface and certainly assuming
Shelley to be the author of Frankenstein, Sir Walter Scott begins his review by describing the
novel and its literary kin in a way that seems remarkably
prescient of Wellsian science fiction. Frankenstein is
included amongst those works where the marvellous is presented
not for its own sake, as in the case of "Tom Thumb," but for its
probable effect on human beings, as in the case of Gulliver's "Voyage to
Brobdingnag": "we grant the extraordinary postulate which the
author demands as the foundations of his narrative, only on
condition of his deducing the consequences with logical
precision."12 Superficially, there can be no
question that there is indeed a science-fictional feel about
Frankenstein, but I would hesitate before classifying it
outright as science fiction and I would certainly not want to
argue that Frankenstein is the first genuine such work.
As befits a scientific rather than a supernatural genre, the
soul of science fiction did not suddenly descend as Brian Aldiss would have it; rather
contemporary science fiction is the result of successive stages
of evolution. Frankenstein might be regarded as one
evolutionary breakthrough.

The problem with regarding Frankenstein as straight
science fiction is that, although the monster is apparently
animated by scientific means, that science is treated by Mary
Shelley in a metaphoric manner that owes more to the occult,
superstitious "sciences" that Victor supposedly moves away from,
than to any of the modern hard sciences that he apparently
pursues. As will become clear, the scientific element in
Frankenstein -- the imagistic use of magnetism and
electricity -- suggests a well-nigh alchemical realm of
transcendence. It serves the ends of sublimity. In fact, like
most of the ostensibly exclusive oppositions in
Frankenstein, that between alchemy and science is both
real and illusory.

Frankenstein's enthusiasm for natural philosophy began when he
picked up "a volume of the works of Cornelius Agrippa." In spite
of his father's claim that such rubbish is a waste of time,
Victor continues to study "the wild fancies" (p. 39) of Agrippa, Paracelsus
and Albertus Magnus. As John A. Dussinger suggests,
Frankenstein's subsequent career can be regarded as a rebellion
against the rationalistic world represented by his father.13 In support
of this symbolic possibility, Dussinger resorts to the 1818 text
which includes an {59} episode excised in the 1831 version in
which Victor's father demonstrates that lightning is electricity
by repeating Franklin's experiment with a kite. Presumably the
episode went because of a related annotation that Mary Shelley
addresses to Frankenstein in the copy she gave to Mrs. Thomas:
"you said your family was not scientific."14 And so he
did. In the 1831 version, after Frankenstein's specification
that "My father was not scientific" (p. 40), "a man of great research
in natural philosophy" (p. 4)
is briefly introduced to provide the information previously put
in the mouth of Victor's father. It would appear that
Frankenstein's rebellion against the narrow rationalism of his
father is not necessarily a rebellion against science.
Similarly, at the university in Ingolstadt, Frankenstein
reacts negatively to the closed mind of Professor Krempe who
dismisses the Alchemists' works as "nonsense" (p. 45) but positively to
Professor Waldman who argues that the expansive spirit of the
ancient alchemists is not incompatible with the methodology of
modern science.

Radu Florescu quotes with approval Rieger's conclusion that "it
would be a mistake to call Frankenstein a pioneer work of
science fiction. Its author knew something of Sir Humphrey
Davy's chemistry, Erasmus Darwin's botany, and perhaps Galvani's
physics, but little of this got into her book. Frankenstein's
chemistry is switched-on magic, souped-up alchemy, the
electrification of Agrippa and Paracelsus."15 However,
eleven years earlier Rieger seems to have concluded differently.
His article, "Dr. Polidori and the Genesis of Frankenstein,"
includes the assertion that "Frankenstein may be vulgarly termed
science fiction."16 The truth is that generically
Frankenstein occupies a place on the borders of science
fiction and other forms of what I have elsewhere defined as
apocalyptic literature.17 It "transcends" the genre of
science fiction. In my terms, apocalyptic writers create other
worlds which, by virtue of a reading convention, exist (on a
literal level) in a credible relationship with the "real" world
as commonly understood. This credibility depends upon overtures
to either reason or a religious kind of faith. It will be
apparent that this formulation includes both serious science
fiction and such works as The
Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost. To conceive
of the category "apocalyptic literature" is to immediately
appreciate how the structure and concerns of science fiction
parallel, slide into, or may be embraced by, structures of
transcendence. Frankenstein is very much a case in point
and hence Rieger's contradictory statements. Frankenstein
cannot be accounted for as science fiction with any degree of
comprehensibility because, as Florescu states, "Mary's monster
is more the child of the alchemists and occultists than of the
scientists."18

The alchemical promise of immortality which obsesses
Frankenstein seems to have at least intrigued Mary Shelley. Two
of her tales and a speculative essay deal variously with the
theme of extended life. In "The Mortal Immortal" (1834), the topic is
linked directly to alchemy. Winzy, an assistant of Cornelius
Agrippa, is writing his account three centuries after have drunk
and then spilled his master's magical beverage. Immortality
turns out to be a curse and despairingly Winzy looks at himself
for signs of mortality and decay.

Two related pieces treat the kindred theme of reanimation. An
unfinished tale, entitled by Charles E. Robinson "Valerius: The
Reanimated Roman,"19 is silent about the process of
revival but explicit about Valerius's depressive reaction to the
declined condition of nineteenth-century Rome. In mood and
theme this story of the last true Roman is clearly anticipative
of Mary's The Last Man (1826). "Roger
Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman" is Charles E. {60}
Robinson's title for a piece he recently discovered that Mary
wrote in response to a contemporary hoax.20 It was
submitted for publication to the New Monthly Magazine in
1826 but not printed until 1863 when it appeared without a title
in a volume of reminiscences by an editor of the New Monthly
Magazine. Supposedly Dodsworth "died" in 1654 in
circumstances that kept him in a frost-locked state of suspended
animation. This detail plus the concluding paragraphs, in which
Mary speculates on the possibilities if we all remembered
previous lives, make the Dodsworth piece the most
science-fictional of her writings. The only alchemical change
relevant here is that the Dodsworth essay is a particularly
clear indicator of the way in which certain hoaxical forms and
incidents become transmuted into science fiction.21

Essentially Frankenstein was drawn to the alchemists because, in their
ambitions, they transcended human limitations, they "sought
immortality and power" (p.
46). Under their guidance, "I entered with the greatest
diligence into the search of the philosopher's stone and the
elixir of life; but the latter soon obtained my undivided
attention." Symbolically, the transformation of lead into gold
with the old philosopher's stone betokens the transmutation of
the alchemist from a physical to a presumably eternal spiritual
state. To a degree, then, Frankenstein is posing a false
dichotomy. No less than the elixir of life, the philosopher's
stone promises immortality. The effect is to blur the equation
between immortality and transcendence. A corresponding confusion
characterizes Frankenstein's subsequent pronouncement: "Wealth
was an inferior object; but what glory would attend the
discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame and
render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!" (p. 40). In the pursuit of the
philosopher's stone, which is here seemingly rejected, wealth is
equally an inferior object and the reward of eternal life
renders man invulnerable to death per se. The creation of the
monster is linked to something much grander -- life after death,
the resurrection of the body: "Life and death appeared to me
ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a
torrent of light into our dark world. . . . I thought
that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might
in process of time . . . renew life where death had
apparently devoted the body to corruption" (p. 54). Frankenstein seeks the
power of God on the day of resurrection. No wonder that Chevalier's frontispiece for
the 1831 edition, depicting a revitalized figure in a
chapel-like laboratory,22 appears to owe as much to the
biblical raising of Lazarus as to the details of Mary Shelley's
text.

It should, in fact, be emphasized that, from the start,
Frankenstein's ambitions are a paradoxical mix of the material
and the spiritual: "It was the secrets of heaven and earth that
I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of
things, or the inner nature and the mysterious soul of man that
occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the
metaphysical, or, in the highest sense, the physical secrets of
the world" (p. 37). Here is a
particularly brazen instance of that solipsistic dissolution of
distinction which might be considered a stylistic trademark of
Frankenstein. If the essential distinction between a
perceiving consciousness and an exterior reality is lost, what
other distinctions can hold? And so we are encouraged to
understand the physical and the metaphysical not as opposites
but as synonyms.

It is the function of the
sublime ingredients in Frankenstein, especially the
Mont Blanc area, to make
this conjunction of the transcendent and the material, the
secular and the sacred, metaphorically manifest. Mary's
treatment of electricity and magnetism is among those sublime
ingredients. Electricity is {61} to the Alps as magnetism is to
the Arctic wastes. The lure of magnetism that leads Walton to
the ends of the earth, to "a country of eternal light" (p. 16) is symbolically akin to
the electrical discharges which cause the Alps in a stormy
summer to be illuminated by lightning. In one dramatic scene,
the lightning and Mont Blanc are procreatively wedded.

Returning to Geneva in response to the news of William's death,
Frankenstein "was obliged to cross the lake in a boat to arrive
at Plainpalais. During this short voyage I saw the lightning
playing on the summit of Mont Blanc in the most beautiful
figures" (p. 75). The
ambiguity of "figures" is deliberate. Amidst this sublime
tempest, "so beautiful yet terrific," making the lake from the
land appear, like Milton's Hell, "a vast sheet of fire," one
figure soon detaches itself: "I perceived in the gloom a figure
which stole from behind a clump of trees near me.
. . . A flash of lightning illuminated the object and
discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, and
the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to
humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the
filthy demon to whom I had given life." Its appearance follows
immediately on Frankenstein's almost exultant apostrophe to the
storm: "William, dear angel! this is thy funeral, this thy
dirge!" (p. 76). In the
colloquial sense, it is the monster who is William's funeral and
the effect of the syntax and the word "figures" is to equate the
monster with the overall spectacle. This scene is a symbolic
analogue to that in which Frankenstein infused "a spark of being
into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet" (p. 57). Lightning electrifies
the Alps and gives life to the sublime Alpine qualities that the
monster might be said to personify. If, as seems likely, the
time-lapse impression in the same scene of the monster's
bounding movements from crag to crag echoes the action of the thunder in Byron's
Childe Harold, an
association between the monster and the elements is also to be
inferred. Indeed, on a later occasion, the monster, after
"running with the swiftness of lightning, plunged into the lake"
(p. 196).

This scene is twice recreated making it an example, and perhaps
the most important one, of a technique used three times that may
be called metamorphic duplication. In the other two instances,
however, a scene is recreated only once. The features of a Swiss
landscape are duplicated in a German one. And on two occasions
the monster is presented hovering over the body of prone
Frankenstein. The basic purpose of this technique is to convey a
sense of unity in a situation where separation is more
apparent. In the case of the scene with which we are presently
concerned, what is mirrored or prefigured first of all is
Frankenstein's next meeting with his creation.

In this episode Frankenstein is in the immediate vicinity of
Mont Blanc but otherwise events transpire as before. The same
formulaic sequence applies: 1) an elevation of spirits; 2) a
direct address to the spirit world; 3) the immediate appearance
of the monster. Here is the context of the first encounter:

This noble war in the sky elevated my spirits; I clasped my
hands, and exclaimed aloud, "William, dear angel! This is thy
funeral, this thy dirge!" As I said these words, I perceived in
the gloom a figure. (p. 76)

And here is the context of the second encounter:

{62} My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with
something like joy; I exclaimed -- "Wandering spirits, if indeed
ye wander, and do not rest in your narrow beds, allow me this
faint happiness, or take me, as your companion, away from the
joys of life."

Not only is the succession of events the same but so are several
of the actual words and phrases. This parallelism provides the
clearest evidence that Mary Shelley wished to convey the notion
that Frankenstein, the Alpine setting and the monster may be
considered as a continuum. The experience of sublimity created
within Frankenstein by the setting calls the monster into
being. And since electricity is the source of life, it is
surely not accidental that, at the end of the chapter before
that in which Frankenstein meets his monster for the second
time, he watches "the pallid lightning that played above Mont
Blanc" (p. 95) before
submitting to the oblivion of sleep. It may be recalled that the
monster as originally described is somewhat pallid and unhealthy
looking.

The situation in which an address by Frankenstein to the spirit
world is answered immediately by the appearance of the monster
is duplicated a second time shortly after the murder of
Elizabeth and the death of his father. Standing by the graves
(or what are referred to in the indented quotation above as the
"narrow beds") of William, Elizabeth and his father,
Frankenstein is conscious of "the spirits of the departed
. . . I knelt on the grass, and kissed the earth, and
with quivering lips exclaimed [this word is used in the two
previous similar episodes], 'By the sacred earth on which I
kneel, by the shades that wander near me . . . I swear
. . . to pursue the daemon, who caused this misery until he or I
shall perish in mortal conflict.'" The tangible earth and the
intangible spirit world are here united. Becoming increasingly
enraged (a heightening of depressed spirits if not
exactly an elevation as in the two previous episodes, the
imminent appearance of the monster is similarly associated with
a change of mental state), Frankenstein continues: "And I call
on you, spirits of the dead, and on you, wandering ministers of
vengeance, to aid and conduct me in my work." Immediately, "I
was answered through the stillness of night by a loud and
fiendish laugh" which "the mountains re-echoed. . . ."
Momentarily, "I felt as if all hell surrounded me" but the voice
which whispers "close to my ear" (p. 202) he recognizes as that of
his monster.

This scene juxtaposes four apparent realities -- Frankenstein's
psyche, the natural world, the spirit world and the monster --
in a way that casts doubt upon their existence as separable
entities. It should further be observed that an electrical storm
is present here but completely internalized, created by the
discharging neurons within Frankenstein's skull: "The furies
possessed me as I concluded, and rage choked my utterance." Some
evidence of this internal tempest is provided by the reference
to the spirits (one is tempted to visualize them as lightning
flashes) which "seemed to flit around, and to cast a shadow
which was felt but not seen, around the head of the mourner" (p. 202).

Frankenstein first became aware of the power of electricity --
its destructive rather than creative aspect -- when he was
"about fifteen years old." During a violent thunderstorm, "I
beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak
. . . and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the
oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump."
The tree itself "was {63} not splintered by the shock, but
entirely reduced to thin ribbons of wood. I never beheld
anything so utterly destroyed" (p. 41). Although this episode is
in both the 1818 and the 1831 versions, the successive
paragraphs differ. At the end of the new succession of
paragraphs which Mary wrote for the 1831 edition, an equation is
insinuated between the blasted tree and Frankenstein's fate.
Although diverted from his alchemical obsessions for a while,
"Destiny was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my
utter and terrible destruction" (p. 42). Like the tree,
Frankenstein is to be "utterly destroyed." As Frankenstein later
observes, "I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul"
(p. 160); the same comparison
applies when Frankenstein speaks of his creation daring "again
to blast me" (p. 183) and of
himself as "one blasted and miserable" (p. 190). Specifically, he has
been "blasted" (p. 218) in
his hopes of scientific distinction. The blasted tree is to
Frankenstein as the Alps are to the monster. In both cases, a
being and an aspect of the external environment are confused.

The destructive aspect of electricity and lightning manifests
itself as fire and thereby the monster also learns about its
dangerous nature. Attracted by the heat of an abandoned fire,
the monster thrusts his hand into the live embers. The discovery
of pain causes the monster to reflect, with puzzlement, "that
the same cause should produce such opposite effects!" The Promethean flame is an
ambiguous gift. Soon he realizes that "the fire gave light as
well as heat" (p. 105) and
pain. The words in which the monster projects his final
immolation affirm that such diverse aspects may indeed by
united: "Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall
ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of
the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade
away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds" (p. 223).23 And a region
of deathly cold will have known, if only fleetingly, the warmth
of life. The central apocalyptic images of fire and ice will
have been reconciled. However, that apocalypse is not
dramatized. The first use the monster actually makes of fire is
purely destructive. Out of feelings of rejection he sets alight
the De Lacey cottage at the symbolic moment that the moon's
light sinks below the western horizon: "The wind fanned the
fire, and the cottage was quickly enveloped by the flames, which
clung to it, and licked it with their forked and destroying
tongues" (p. 139). A
convincing facsimile of an Edenic world is obliterated.

But it is, in fact, as an apocalyptic source of light and
revelation that electricity and magnetism are primarily valued.
Frankenstein's discovery of the secret of life is presented as a
religious revelation: "from the midst of darkness a sudden light
broke upon me -- a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so
simple, that . . . I became dizzy with the immensity
of the prospect which it illustrated. . ." (p. 52). Apparently the secret of
life is of a spiritual nature and its discovery involves the
experience of transcendence: "Life and death appeared to me as
ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a
torrent of light into our dark world" (p. 54). Electricity will serve
to animate dead matter not because of any scientific rationale
but because its nature is spiritual. The idea was not uncommon
and indeed Volney's Ruins of Empire, the
book Felix uses to teach Safie English, contains an allusion to that
mystical doctrine: "the more I consider what the ancients
understood by ether or spirit, and what the Indians call
akache, the stronger do I find the analogy between it and
the electrical fluid."24

{64} It is as an embodiment of the spiritual power of
electricity that Frankenstein repeatedly calls his creation a
"daemon" not, as several modern texts would have it, a
"demon."25
This corruption radically falsifies Mary's intention. The modern
reader, seeing the word "demon" will understand it to mean some
kind of fiend or evil being. As originally spelt and as Mary
Shelley uses it, the word "daemon" simply means a spiritual
power, irrespective of its moral nature. The point needs
emphasizing that, in going beyond human bounds, the territory in
which Frankenstein finds himself is at least metaphorically
spiritual.

No less than Frankenstein, Walton is after the ultimate secrets
of Heaven and Earth. And magnetism, no less than electricity,
promises the secret of life, of animation. The pervasive use of
such words as "animation" and "animated" stresses the fact that
life is movement. Because the earth revolves around its
polarized axis, magnetism might be said to give movement
"animation -- to dead inert matter. The spiritual nature of
Walton's ambitions is subtly emphasized. They cause his heart to
glow "with an enthusiasm which elevates me to heaven." Walton's
enthusiasm had been given a romantic colouring by his reading
"those poets whose effusions entranced my soul, and lifted it to
heaven. I also became a poet, and lived for one year in a
Paradise of my own creation" (p.
17). Similarly, Frankenstein recalls, "I trod heaven in my
thoughts" (p. 211). It
should be noted that Walton's first letter is addressed from St. Petersburg and his second
from Archangel, place
names which M. A. Goldberg realizes are "hardly fortuitous."26 They point
to the spiritual realm of Frankenstein's and Walton's ambitions,
and perhaps, if Frankenstein's subsequent comparison between
himself and "the archangel who aspired to omnipotence" (p. 211) is judged relevant, to
a "noble war in the sky" (p.
76), a confrontation of the ultimate forces of good and
evil.

The light of life is an unearthly one and its source somewhere
very like that place in the sky, a place beyond the rim of the
world. Thus, "the ever-moving glacier" filled Frankenstein "with
a sublime ecstasy that gave wings to the soul, and allowed it to
soar from the obscure world to light and joy" (p. 97). Walton expects to find
at the North Pole "a country of eternal light" (p. 16) where "the sun is
forever visible" (p. 17). In
the copy of Frankenstein Mary gave to Mrs. Thomas, she
corrected her scientific mistake and substituted for the words
"of eternal light" the explanatory statement "ruled by different
laws and in which numerous circumstances enforce a belief that
the aspect of nature differs essentially from any such thing of
which we have any experience."27 However, in the 1831 edition the
error is allowed to stand, presumably on the basis of its
symbolic appropriateness. The "country of eternal light" is a
sublime region where natures of essentially different aspect,
like the monster's, rule. It is that region "rendered sublime by
the mighty Alps, where white and shining pyramids and domes
towered above all, as belonging to another earth, the
habitations of another race of beings" (p. 94-95), and that region
referred to by the monster as "another world" (p. 101) which the sun illumines
as it sinks behind the snowy mountain precipices.

Compass directions are important in Frankenstein both as
indicative of intellectual or emotional dominance and of the way
in which that distinction is subtly inverted. At the pole where
the compass points in all directions this process reaches its
apotheosis.28 All intellectual bearings are
lost, knowledge is shown to be contradictory and problematical.
But if the source of magnetism throws human understanding into
question, the possibility of a {65} transcendent knowledge is
left open and magnetism itself affirms the power of love and
emotion. All of Frankenstein may be comprehended in terms
of the symbolism of magnetism or the ideas related to
magnetism. Magnetism is that force of attraction which draws
things together, including both human beings and the seemingly
disparate parts of Mary Shelley's creation.